Hi.
This mail should serve both as a reminder for all of you of the planned
BSPs around the world this weekend and as a proposal for some some tasks
to tackle then.
Until now there are three "real-life" BSPs announced for this weekend,
27th and 28th November, in Frankfurt (Germany)[1], Sydney (Australia)[2],
and Cambridge (United Kingdom)[3]. Additionally developers from Latin
America proposed[4] to do a virtual BSP to fix more RC bugs than all the
others. ;)
If you would like to attend one of these parties, you can find
additional links regarding these events on
http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?BSPlanning
With so many people planning to squash some bugs, one might wonder
where to start. What are useful targets for their efforts?
I will show you some -- but first a few necessary words on coordination:
#debian-bugs on irc.debian.org (and #debian-bugs on irc.oftc.net, if
there is interest) will be the main channel(s) for overall coordination.
Do not hesitate to ask there before tackling any task; there will certainly
be people available that can advise against tackling problematic tasks or
tasks already worked on, and give general advice.
When working on specific bugs, please claim[5] them or let a DD claim them
for you. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/claims.cgi for a list of
claims. Tasks that can not be expressed by a claim but are big enough
to warrant a notice for others should be noted on
http://wiki.debian.net/?BSP or pages linked from there.
Help sarge forward:
Sadly enough, the main hindrances for sarge (or at least for a freeze)
are infrastructural, which few people can do something about. Although
there are quite a few RC bugs left (about 150 at the time of this
writing), many of them are new and either better left to the maintainers of
that package, or not easily solvable by NMUs. There are some that
need attention and where help is welcome. However, when these are solved,
there is still much to do for sarge:
- Test the installer. d-i RC2 was just released[6] and should be tested
by many people to help the people working on it judge whether it is
a worthy release candidate (they sure hope it is :)
See http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for more information
on how to get it, known issues, etc.
- Test woody->sarge upgrades. This is particularly useful with "real"
systems since you might notice problems that will never occur in
more or less clean chroots (hint: there is no one saying you can't
use a copy of your real system ;)
Tasks not specific to the release:
You don't have to concentrate on a sarge-related task if that's not
what lets you have fun. Some other suggestions:
- Fix RC bugs in unstable. Due to the strict removal policy of the
release team, the base freeze, and some other partial freezes, the
number of RC bugs in unstable is significantly higher than the bug
count in testing. There is a lot of work to do here.
http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical is your starting point:
look out for bugs marked [X] or [U].
- Translate. There are quite a few .pot files out there waiting for
you. ;) Start at http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/. (If you're new
to l10n and/or new to l10n in Debian, try to find someone at your
BSP or on IRC to guide you through the first steps. This helps
avoid wasted effort and frustration.)
- Fix bugs in orphaned packages. At
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?maint=packages@qa.debian.org
you can find all bugs in orphaned packages, free to be squashed by
anyone.
- Fix bugs tagged "help". See
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=help for a list.
I for myself will attend the BSP in Frankfurt and hope to see many of you
this weekend there or on IRC.
Gruesse,
--
Frank 'BSP coordinator' Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/11/msg00002.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/11/msg00193.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/11/msg00004.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-spanish/2004/11/msg00016.html
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2004/debian-qa-200403/msg00165.html
[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/11/msg00010.html